At some point last year, I took an interest in Copic markers, a set of markers meant to be used to shade drawings. Usually, if you color a picture, while markers produce vibrant colors, the same bold color makes it difficult to shade or blend the markers if you have so few. Luckily, Copic sells 358 different colors of markers, which may be an overwhelming selection until you learn about the codes they grant each color. Every Copic marker has an alphanumeric code which tells you the appropriate way to use it if you shade, usually in the form of “R24” or “BG13” or something like that. The letters correspond to the color family of the marker (for example: “R” for red, “B” for blue, “BG” for blue-green / cyan / teal, “E” for earth colors), the first number identifies a brightness / shade / “purity” within that color family, and the last digit tells how light or dark the color is (0 is the lightest, 9 is the darkest). It reminds me of the hue, saturation, and luminosity values when you pick colors on a computer, except it can now be applied to ink. Apparently, you can shade with these markers by layering several colors of the same “hue” and “saturation” but different “luminosities”. It was an intriguing concept (which I only discovered last year), and I was curious about these markers.
Unfortunately, Copic markers are quite expensive. If a concrete arts & crafts store sells them, individual Sketch markers are about $8 each. Packs of three, six, or twelve sorted for their shading purposes are obviously more and not much of a discount (if any), and they are sometimes gated off from the rest of the merchandise. Since I arguably spend more time making art through the computer rather than physical prints (which I should do), I was unsure how often I would use these markers and which ones. Copic drawing in real life may not work so well, so I took a different approach to testing these markers.
I searched online for a complete color palette of Copic colors I could load into Photoshop. Copic provides the palette themselves, and the colors from that look just like the colors displayed on the website. However, after testing them out their palette, I thought the colors I got from it were too light and faded. Though I have not gathered many Copic markers, I did receive a few for Christmas, and compared to what I was seeing on the screen, the real deal seems much darker and more vibrant. Thus, I kept searching online for substitute palettes, preferably one made by the real markers.
Eventually, I found this chart from a DeviantArt account called Jad-Ardat, where the uploader organized every single marker into a graph and colored each square with the appropriate color. They put a lot of work into this, and I am grateful they did, because these shades looked much closer to what I was seeing from the markers I had used. I decided (once I blended the inside of each square because it was still noisy in most of them) to use this palette and test it on my drawings going forward this year.
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| Final Design Possibilites: near-white-blue (porcelain) vs pale blue (frost) |
For one of my first drawings with these Copic colors, I decided to test them on my little moon mage, Sakura Miyazaki, but I also tested these colors because I have been considering a redesign for Sakura’s palette before I start working on my “Lucids” stories. Eventually, I ended with the images below as my finalists, and I would love some feedback on which version you prefer. Before that, though, an explanation for why I would recolor one of my classic characters.
This design I have for Sakura has not been my first, but it has been the most consistent design I have used. The green eyes are a stubborn staple for her, both for Ken’s satisfaction and my own. Red has been the most prominent color in her uniform for a long time, also decided early in development due to her name referencing a flower which would bear a red fruit. Over the years, I have altered details and colors about Sakura’s uniform repeatedly. A one-piece dress, yellow metal parts, red shoulder plates, and small dress shoes were all details I once used for her design and eventually discarded. Eventually, I wound up at the design featured in my Group Shot drawing, and this is the Sakura design which has stuck with me longest. I am happy with this design, but I am still wondering about the colors.
I once mentioned how giving too many colors to a character could lose the character (or something like that), so I wanted to simplify the colors as much as I could without wrecking the design. Red would obviously stay, and the green eyes were a detail I wanted to keep, so I began to think of some ideas.
1.) One iteration using Copic’s downloadable palette had me testing not just teal gloves but a teal skirt, too. In the teal-heavy days, I also considered altering one other major detail about Sakura: instead of her dark blue hair, it would now be black (or dark grey) with green highlights in the Dream Dimension. Although my mother liked this look (because green is her favorite color), I thought it made the green / teal too prominent on Sakura, engulfing the red. You can see in this iteration what I meant earlier about the “official” Copic palette being too light.
2.) What if I give the pink / purple more presence? Maybe I can alter the gloves and stockings to be pink while leaving the metal parts teal. How would that look? I think this is a bit much. There is not enough variance between the stockings and the skirt, in my opinion.
3.) Okay, I will keep the green gloves. How about we turn the skirt a darker purple, though? I have wanted to test a purple or blue skirt for Sakura for a while, but how would it look? Looks okay but maybe too “red” a purple. I never made the lips of her boots match in this iteration.
4.) Maybe I focused too much on keeping the green. What if we made Sakura’s skirt blue and her gloves and tights a lighter shade of that blue? I picked out the B60s family because it looked to be a more indigo color than some of the other blues. I could also restore Sakura’s hair to its true blue glory with this variant.
Version 4 stuck with me for a while. This “stratospheric blue” was a nice touch for a character whose powers were based on the moon. Red and blue were a classic combo, right? However, while this iteration was appealing to me at first, I started to see more issues with it.
For one thing, this stratospheric blue is nice in concept, but I felt like it clashed too much with Sakura’s red dress. There is still a bit too much purple or red in this blue to make it look nice with Sakura’s red dress. Like with the mostly-teal variant, I also thought the cool color was overshadowing the warmth of Sakura’s reds. The tone of Sakura’s skin was outputting to me, too. I picked that color for the shading to stay a self-imposed color limit, but it looked weird as a shade color in this case. Finally, there is also a trait about Sakura’s color choice which connects with some other characters in an obscure way, suffice to say I had made Sakura the “strawberry” option in this group. I had made the stratospheric blue design back in April, but with all of this in mind, I decided to return to the drawing board.
I wanted to address the skin thing first. I used R22 to shade the skin before, the same color as the highlights on the dress. I did this because I wanted to limit myself to sixteen total colors for this image, a limit imposed by many sprite-based games. However, I eventually got over that limit and decided to make her skin tone different, using a new shading color. Instead of lumping her skin into the same R2x group as her dress, her skin was now the R0x group, a more natural skin color, in my opinion.
To retain the “strawberry” significance, I wanted to make Sakura’s skirt pink again. However, I thought something looked off about the colors I used before (V01, V12, V15 for the light, base, and shadow), which fell into the violet group. I wanted something pinker and eventually hit upon the R8x family, a set of rosy red colors. These still fell into the red family, but it was a noticeably different shade than the dress, and reminiscent of my previous coloring method. “This will work”, I thought.
From this point forward, the gloves, tights, and metal pieces were free from the constraint of the skirt; free to be whatever color they want and accent the reds of Sakura Miyazaki! But what color should they be? Teal green or blue?
Why not color both and sort it out later? I felt at first teal would be better because of the “strawberry” idea I had in mind, so I drew that out. It turned out to be a nice contrast with the reds. However, I still wanted to at least test a blue variant of gloves, this time using more “sky” shades of blue instead (not quite cyan, but getting there). To my surprise, while teal was nice, I was personally preferring the blues I chose. Then again, I may have ultimately preferred the blue one because I was also using blue hair, while the teal variant had dark grey hair with bronze highlights. I knew what I liked at that moment, but what would other people think?
I asked my folks and my best friend about this issue to get some feedback. My mother preferred the teal version, but everyone else liked the blue version more. Okay, this is it, then. This will be Sakura Miyazaki!
…or so I thought until I went to print her and began to think her gloves may be too dark a blue when I printed. I went with these light shades to give a more subtle accent. Maybe if I used lighter shades of blue, then it will turn out great.
So, here we are. At the top of this post, just before the break, were two iterations of Sakura Miyazaki, with a subtle difference between them: the shading of the gloves. Please let me know which version you prefer in the comments below. Personally, I lean more toward the lighter shades of the gloves and tights, but if more people prefer the frost blue over the pale porcelain, then I will do that instead.
Sakura Miyazaki, an aspiring “moon mage” once mentally chained by her doubt, has had enough of feeling powerless. She is ready to write a new chapter of her life among the Nights who venture across the Dream Dimension. She is ready to live.
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